NASA's cozy relationship with Hollywood is kind of a gamble

It's pretty obvious that "The Martian" is basically a two-hour-plus love letter to space exploration and, by extension, to NASA. But that's nothing new. The agency has a comfortable relationship with Hollywood.

The agency isn't alone here. The Pentagon also lends its technology, expertise and even filming locations to Hollywood. But it's also infamous for insisting filmmakers cast the military in a positive light in exchange for its help.

Marvel's "The Avengers" famously lost the Pentagon's support and had to rely on CGI and props for its military hardware, all because the Defense Department didn't much care for S.H.I.E.L.D., the shadowy government organization that brings the Avengers together.

Unlike the Pentagon, NASA says it doesn't discriminate when it comes to helping filmmakers. Public outreach is built into the agency's charter, and its only rule is that the film be meant to inform, or at least entertain, and not outright mislead the public.

NASA plans to send people to Mars by 2030:

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NASA's cozy relationship with Hollywood is kind of a gamble

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But it also doesn't have to worry about its image. If NASA is involved in a film's plot, it's a safe bet heroic astronauts and brainy engineers are going to save the day. Even when things go wrong, NASA's on-screen presence is all about triumph.

There are critics who say the agency's ever-growing Hollywood fame could backfire, though. What if, for instance, NASA doesn't get to Mars? A National Research Council report last year said to try to make the mission work with NASA's current budget "is to invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something that the United States does best."

The critics later latched on to what looked like a case of lowered expectations for Asteroid Redirect Mission, part of NASA's road map to Mars. It went from an ambitious plan to send humans to an asteroid to a much less impressive plan to have a robot fetch part of an asteroid and bring it to the astronauts.

The fear is that the public might stop buying into the NASA hype if a manned Mars mission stays a distant dream. One former NASA official told The Washington Post, "We're setting expectations for something that is decades away. The public has a short attention span."

But what NASA can deliver depends on the budget Congress gives it, and that depends on public support. Pew Research Center found that, in NASA's history, "at no time has more than 22 percent of the public said that the U.S. spends too little on space exploration." Maybe the agency hopes that its Mars hype will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.